“I’ve never said I’m a perfect person, nor pretended to be someone that I am not. I’ve said and done things I regret, and the words released today on this more than a decade-old video, are one of them,” Donald Trump said, in a videotaped message posted to Facebook, on Friday night. “I said it, I was wrong, and I apologize.”
Trump’s somber statement came more than eight hours after The Washington Post published audio and video of the Republican nominee from 2005, in which he bragged that his stardom allowed him to “anything” he wanted to women, including, “grab them by the pussy.” In that time, Republican Party leadership—including Speaker Paul Ryan and Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus—condemned his words, but notably did not retract their support for his candidacy. In his apology, Trump said that his experience campaigning for the presidency has “changed me” and promised “to be a better man tomorrow and will never, ever let you down.” But he also dismissed the story as a “distraction” from more serious issues and notably did not apologize for the inappropriate, if not criminal, behavior his words suggested he engaged in.
-Olivia Nuzzi
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